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Inequality we all connive at

by Simon Tait
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Black Lives Matter has hit the arts, and so it should. Our culture is who we are, and BLM is telling us that some of us haven’t noticed who we have become.

It will probably bring to a close at least two distinguished careers. Mark Featherstone-Witty not only founded the Brit School which opened up performing arts education for thousands of young people, with Paul McCartney he also founded the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, LIPA, with himself as principal, and next year it will have its 25th birthday. After the death of George Floyd he was asked by LIPA students to support BLM, and posted instead “every life matters”.  Many would think that is a reasonable stance to take, because it's true. But as he came to realise too late, he’d missed the point: the issue here is black lives, not everyone else’s. He was using the phrase in its broadest sense, he said in apology a couple of days later. “I was unaware that this had been used by some groups to undermine and diminish the fight against racism and prejudice. If I had, I would never have used it. I deeply regret any offence it has caused”. But that’s not good enough: his resignation has been demanded and it will probably come. 

Gavin Henderson was formerly principal of Trinity College of Music which he rescued by moving it from Marylebone to Greenwich, and became principal of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama 13 years ago, opening its £17m new wing in 2017. He was called out by the Students’ Union last year when he rejected diversity quotas, insisting the first criterion had to be quality. There was an independent equality review that cleared him of racism, but the review said there needed to be more clarity about what racial equality was and a more systematic measuring of progress. But now the thing has taken on a different aspect, and Henderson has stood down. 

The Stage newspaper has gone deeper into what happens in some drama schools than they seem to have themselves, despite pledges. It found that at Central, for instance, one black student who graduated in 2018 was told by a teacher, “You will play a slave and you have to come to terms with that, it’s inherent in your trauma”. She went on social media to raise it but was shut down by the school which cited the non-disclosure agreements pupils have to sign. She said Henderson failed to recognise that times change. He instituted an ongoing programme of action following a race equality review last year, but the school now admits to being “complicit in ongoing systemic and institutional racism”. The Stage found similar stories at RADA, the Oxford School of Drama and The Academy of Live and Recorded Arts. The simple truth is that, whatever the excuses, there are not enough black students in our drama schools, and if correcting that means quotas we must have them.
 
The stories are shaming, but racial ignorance is alive throughout our systems, often acknowledged but not acted on. Three years ago Bristol’s Colston Hall responded to local objections to its name’s connotations and announced that with a major rebuild it would be renaming it. It hopes to announce it in the autumn because a three-year consultation still hasn’t discovered what it should be called. Well-meaning complacency won’t do anymore.

Of course there is institutional racism in this country, look no further than the egregious policy driven racism of the Home Office which won’t be allowed to pass unremarked on Windrush Day, June 22. But elsewhere it’s so old that it’s become ingrained and subversive. While in the USA racism is overt, their payback for having had a Civil War to get rid of slavery in which 600,000 died, 40,000 of them black, here - where slavery was born - it's covertly entrenched. In his blog this week ACE’s Darren Henley makes a passionate pledge to do better which has been immediately called out by the Kajans Women’s Enterprise, part of the Birmingham Black and Minority Ethnic Consortium, as “heartfelt platitudes, underpinned by good intentions”. 
 
Our arts have black icons - Steve McQueen, Sonia Boyce, Andrea Levy, Idris Elba, Carlos Acosta, Marlon James, Chris Ofili, Lubaina Himid, Benjamin Zephaniah. But – be honest - is it their art that the usual white, middle class, liberal British audience sees first or the colour of their skin that makes their achievements remarkable? In contrast, four years ago I saw an RSC production of Hamlet with Paapa Essiedu in the title role and the play is reset in the Caribbean (pictured); I watched an embracing of what has become part of our British culture, not racial mockery, and that renewed that sometimes tediously familiar play for me.
 
The anger that saw Colston’s statue pitched into the harbour this week is not new, and it’s familiar. Lists of statues of people associated with slavery are being drawn up, more will go and so they should. Monuments like these are the Victorian street art from an age of hero worship that are no longer relevant, and we have our own street art now which can fill the newly vacated spaces. But the angry behaviour that allowed our government to look past the real issue and instead see “mob violence” must not be the end of it. Our culture is who we are, and it’s who we are that will extinguish this ungainly unnatural attitude through determination and vigilance, and not be fobbed off by declarations of good intentions however earnestly expressed. 
 
“One of the problems we find with humanistic individuals in racially biased institutions” says Kajans’ Hermin McIntosh “is their inability to pursue the entrenchment of the change they advocate through to long term commitment”. Whether it knows it or not our liberal establishment is racially biased and we have to change it.
 

“If you can’t come to art then art will come to you” says the artist Sam Harris, and never has that been truer than in this eerie Covid envelope in history. 

Artists, producers, actors, designers, poets - even archaeologists - are making culture come to you, and it might change the way we access and support the arts for ever. 

Theatres, galleries, museums, concert halls, bookshops, are shut, causing untold financial nightmares, and yet the resourcefulness of the cultural world has never been more evident - or more valuable – in equal measure with its generosity. What aren’t shut are the airways, audial, televisual and digital. 

So just to cheer us up artists such as Quentin Blake, Michael Craig-Martin, Gilbert & George and Damien Hirst have created downloadable posters, some specifically in support of the NHS. At every turn there’s a free concert online, a virtual exhibition tour, a live-streamed theatrical performance, all for free, or mostly, and many of them ask for participation so that there’s an active involvement. 

The National Theatre Live’s latest recordings, of Tamsin Greig’s Twelfth Night and Polly Findlay’s production of Treasure Islandwent out last night via YouTube from National Theatre at Home https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/nt-at-home. And yesterday the RSC marked Shakespeare’s 456th birthday with its largest ever audience by persuading people online to perform a speech, bake a cake, paint a picture, even serenade a neighbour over the garden fence in Shakespearean theme, and over 1,000 did video here. Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre has an annual inter-generational show by its resident Young Company and Elders Company, and the show will go on despite the lockdown, but bigger and better. Instead of the planned show, twice the number of people expected are involved in what is being called Connect Fest, “a theatre show, music festival and soap opera rolled into one”, 40 participants aged 14 to 82 getting together for a show that will be released daily on the Royal Exchange website https://www.royalexchange.co.uk between May 11 and May 15. It may be the model for the future.

The National Gallery already has a vast digital audience, but it grew by 2,000% after lockdown with a tour of the gallery’s pictures which has an emphasis on images of domestic life by staff speaking from their own homes. Artists are teaching, too, with special tutorials on the radio for home-bound kids. And heritage: other museums and galleries are open to those who log-on, with Historic England teaming up with the Council for British Archaeology and the University of Lincoln to offer Dig School, a series of free archaeology workshops helping families and children explore the past through their lap-tops  http://digschool.org.uk/

An important part of what’s been going on in the last month or so has been to do with supporting arts workers in their straits, despite a less than helpful attitude from the Treasury – the latest reflex twitch of its malevolent tail is to tell museums and galleries getting government grants they can’t offer top-ups to furloughed workers in the Job Retention Scheme which gives them 80% of salary, which is often basic national minimum https://www.artsindustry.co.uk/news/2017-treasury-blocking-museum-salary-top-ups.
 
The BBC was one of the first to step forward with its Culture in Quarantine initiative to commission new work for The Space that it runs with the Arts Council https://www.bbc.co.uk/arts. The Sam Harris of the opening paragraph has just launched the Online Art Show website to help sell the art for artists whose exhibitions have been cancelled. In a more catholic spirit, the German Turner winner Wolfgang Tillmans is selling posters of his artwork for £50 to support music venues and arts spaces at risk of going out of business because of Covid, and he’s recruited 40 other artists – including Andreas Gursky, Marlene Dumas and Betty Tompkins – to step in with his campaign “where a lack of audience is causing an existential threat”, and Tillmans is paying for the printing and shipping of posters.

But the TaitMail prize for the best initiative that not only keeps the art in the public eye but at the same time adds some financial relief to artists goes to a scheme dreamed up by a working painter in which artists can help themselves. This is Artist Support Pledge, devised in his Sussex studio by Matthew Burrows and aimed not at the Hirsts, Gurskys and Craig-Martins but the lesser mortals, the more than competent professional painters who survive by selling their work and whose livelihood has been cancelled by a germ. One of the artists, Elizabeth Hannaford emails: “We post five pieces of work at £200 or less each (incl in my case 10% to Mind) using the hashtag #ArtistSupportPledge and when we’ve sold 5 for £1,000 we pledge to buy another’s work for £200. I was thrilled that two framed postcard-sized w’colours sold within hours - to very good homes”.  There are no enforcements, it’s based on trust. 

And it has gone, to coin a phrase, viral. It started on March 17 and in its first week got 9,000 pledges, worth around £9m. “After about four days it went absolutely crazy and I didn't really have a lot of choice but to run with it because it was too big a wave to duck under” says Burrows. “The goodwill has been unbelievable from everywhere in the world—from El Salvador, to America, Germany, New Zealand, Italy and Australia”.

Alongside, and with his friend Keith Tyson, Burrows has created another Instagram outlet for what he calls “artist-on-artist generosity”, Isolation Art School https://www.instagram.com/isolationartschool/?hl=en. It’s free home-based projects for everyone, old and young, ranging from how to make table sculptures by Henry Ward to Isobel Smith making a wearable elephant’s head from  old newspaper, and to come there is flower arranging, painting with varnish, jewellery making to name a few, from the likes of Matt Collishaw, Nigel Cook and Sarah Pickstone. There is even a course for A level students whose schools are closed.

“I want to create an environment and a culture that has human beings attached to it. Not just this anonymous digital thing” says Burrows, and there’s nothing in it for him more than for any of the other artists. “What we are putting out into the world is a movement not a business. The formula is simple: you give generously, you receive gratefully and you give back. That’s it.”

And for the section allowing #ArtistsSupportPledge beneficiaries to give to a nominated charity (the first has been is Hospital Rooms, which commissions artworks for secure NHS mental health units) he has given a label that could be for all the gratis arts offering that has burgeoned in this blight: "The Gifted Keep Giving". 

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